Scrapbooks have forged a bond between two hospitals that are 1,500 miles part.

Jan. 7, 2012

This is a detail from the scrapbook that the Tucson staff sent to Pella. / Mary Chind/Register photos

Written by

kyle munson’s iowa

PELLA, IA. — Precisely one year ago, Diana Crook, a nurse who supervises the evening shift here at Pella Regional Health Center, began wrestling with how she might respond more meaningfully to a violent tragedy 1,500 miles away that shattered fellow medical professionals whom she’d never met.

Jared Loughner, then 22, wielded a single Glock semi-automatic pistol on Jan. 8, 2011, and gunned down 19 people in front of a supermarket in Tucson, killing six of them. Gabrielle Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who was targeted in the slayings and shot in the head, managed a rare recovery to spend the last year in rehabilitation. Her husband, Mark Kelly, meanwhile, captained space shuttle Endeavour’s final flight and then retired from NASA.

Loughner so far has been found mentally incompetent to stand trial and continues to be treated for schizophrenia while in federal custody.

Such details from the brutal event and its aftermath are being solemnly revisited this anniversary weekend.

But here’s the thread hidden within the tragedy’s timeline: Thanks to Crook’s brainstorm — or “heartstorm” as she prefers to call it — a pair of scrapbooks have been swapped between hospitals in response to the Tucson shootings, forging a bond between nurses and doctors as a new, more hopeful coda to the monstrous act.

“It was quite clear in my heart that we had to send (a scrapbook) to all the people that cared for all these people,” Crook said.

Pella Regional is a Level 3 trauma center with a staff of about 800, while the University of Arizona Medical Center in Tucson is a sprawling university teaching hospital with Level 1 trauma capability and 10 times the staff.

All 13 shooting victims were received at the Tucson center, as well as the body of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green. The front lawn of the hospital for weeks teemed with flowers, cards, banners, painted rocks and tiles — all manner of memorials for victims along with the media horde, remembered B.J. Godard, an administrative specialist for the nursing directors.

“Mariachi bands came in the evening,” she said. “It was very spiritual, in a way.”

Pella’s heartfelt book made its way to Godard in July because she’s known as the resident scrapbooker. She began to page through the photos, notes and signatures.

“May you know that you have been in our thoughts and prayers every day since that senseless act,” Crook wrote.

Crook, 63, is an empathetic and deeply spiritual woman from Oskaloosa who has been a nurse for 32 years and started as a candy striper at age 14. She grew up with a father in the Air Force and tagged along at age 5 with her mother who worked at a local nursing home, clambering onto glum residents’ beds to try to cheer them up.

She’s seen plenty of trauma in her medical career — murder and drowning victims, self-inflicted gunshot wounds, injuries from house explosions — although nothing on the scale of Tucson.

“For us to write a 10-minute thank you letter just wasn’t enough,” decided Godard, who began to create a scrapbook in response. “In the end I sent their book everywhere with our book.”

Everywhere included a detour to Oregon on a flight with a couple of nurses, who visited a former chief nursing officer there who wanted to sign the book for Pella.

Tucson’s 80-page reply arrived Christmas Eve on Crook’s doorstep in Oskaloosa — after she and Godard first talked in August, quickly bonded and had been corresponding for months.

Today’s anniversary in Tucson will include a candlelight vigil attended by Giffords as well as her surgeon, Dr. Peter Rhee — whose photo and signature are included in the scrapbook.

One page is dedicated to the obituaries for the six who died, while another page labeled “They survived!” lists the 13 other shooting victims.

President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle appear in photos alongside staff.

There’s an explanation of how Christina Taylor Green’s body was received in the pediatric intensive care unit. “It’s very unusual to bring a deceased child up there,” Godard said. “They took care of her, cleaned her, made her ready for her parents and her brother to spend their final time with her.”

It might sound morbid in the context of this tragedy, but the scrapbook also notes an obscure historical link between the two cities: Pella features the boyhood home of legendary Old West lawman Wyatt Earp, while the O.K. Corral is located just outside Tucson in Tombstone, where Earp engaged in the “world’s most famous gunfight” in 1881.

A nurse in Tucson also included the following note: “We all like to believe that we live in a bubble; that things that are important to us only mean something to us. But sometimes things change that, and our eyes are opened to just how small the world really is.”

Kyle Munson can be reached at (515) 284-8124 or kmunson@ dmreg.com. Connect with him on Facebook (Kyle Munson's Iowa) and Twitter (@KyleMunson).